Operator arguments - Identification if object names are not unique?
Operators should never have pointer properties and as far as I know there aren't any that do.

Such pointers would not be valid after deleting objects or after undo/redo steps, which would give problems in the operator history stack when repeating operators for example.

Operators that take datablock names should usually be avoided for python scripting. It's better to edit the data directly than going through operators when possible, there's probably only a handful of cases where you need to do this.